Julie Clarenbach – Page 15

bright green evergreens It’s been a really hard week.

My work has been really stressful in an emotional way, so I’ve been a little quieter, a little more tired, and a little more fragile than usual. Catharine had her own work stress, which got magnified by taking her morning meds late one day (and possibly having missed them the day before, but we aren’t sure) and missing her evening meds that same day. It’s the equinox, which is notorious for exacerbating mood issues, and I’ve been both PMSy and feeling extremely sensitive to the wonky moon stuff that’s been going on.

It’s meant that she’s been particularly melty — our term for being prone to crying, freaking out, and generally losing one’s center. It’s meant I’ve been particularly unable to deal with said meltiness. It’s meant we’ve had some questionable meals, which hasn’t helped. (Sometimes being a grownup is deciding ice cream with blueberries and chocolate chips is as good as dinner is going to get.)

It’s at times like this that our particular attachment cycles — her anxious, me avoidant — go head to head, and, if we aren’t careful, can spin us into a terrible place where she is a drowning person of neediness and I’m a resolute rock of anger walking away while saying “fuck this.” This is not how we want our marriage to be.

Weeks like this happen, sometimes. They probably happen more often to us than to families who don’t live with mental illness or chronic illness or similar things, because they’re just less sensitive to the vagaries of life, but weeks like this happen. They’re no one’s fault.

But what does get to me sometimes is the implicit assumption that I’m the one who is going to pull us out of it. I’m the one who’s going to “be the bigger person” (what is that metaphor, even?), who’s going to work against my own attachment style, who’s going to put aside, hopefully temporarily, my own needs for care or solitude or quiet to reach out and help quiet her anxiety so we can get to a better place.

Someone has to do it, sure. But this assumption — which is an assumption we both fall into — is born from a pattern in which she is the Identified Patient and I am the Caregiver, and that pattern, which was built in the early years of our relationship, which were also the early years of her diagnosis and recovery, is central to the imbalance and the inequality we’re trying to get past.

This pattern assumes that she is incapable, instead of unskilled. (Hey, recovery takes a long time, especially when it happens after two-plus decades of untreated major mental illness. There are lots of skills to learn/recast, because in some ways it really is a whole new world.) It assumes I am capable, instead of potentially depleted and most definitely limited. It assumes I am the rescuer and she the one who needs rescue. It assumes she is the weak one and I am the strong one.

Every single one of these assumptions is a problem. And every single one of them shows up regularly.

Yesterday we had it out a little bit. I fell apart after too much noise broke my fragile composure, and she started to leave in a huffy sort of way, and then we had one of those fights that’s at least as much crying as fighting and things got better. Later in the day we had another emotional conversation that cleared the air further. Right now she’s at the coffee shop and I’m at home on the couch with my computer and a cat. Chances are today will be markedly better. I’m crossing my fingers that this week will be better than last week. It’s easier to work on these patterns when we aren’t both a complete mess.

In the 13 years of our romantic relationship, my wife and I have been through a lot.

We’ve lost one father, two grandmothers, and three critters. We decided to have a kid, didn’t get pregnant, decided to adopt, went through the home study process, then decided to be childless. We moved twice, once 150 miles to a city in which most of our friends lived, once 3,000 miles to a place we knew very few people. There have been at least three major career shifts between us. She went to graduate school. I had three surgeries. She had two hospitalizations. We’ve together collected about a dozen diagnoses on top of two or three we started with.

It’s been a ride, is what I’m saying.

On the one hand, it’s our life. It’s normal to us, to a certain extent, and so much of it showed up gradually. We got to get used to things.

On the other, you could forgive us for occasionally needing to lay on the floor and marvel at our collective ability to cope.

Even in this midst of all of this really hard stuff, the hardest things to deal with have been my wife’s mental illness and ADD. They’re so constant, and at the same time so variable. They’re isolating, to both of us. They need so much attention and care and discipline. They conflict so wildly with one another.

And, most of all, they and the patterns we’ve formed around them have made it really hard to have a true partnership, a balanced relationship of mutual support. So many things have gotten so much better over the last dozen years since she was first diagnosed, but we haven’t yet been successful in sustaining new patterns.

I’m leery of talking about this in one way, because so much of the discourse around people with mental illness is how hard it is for their families, as if they are only a burden, as if the perspectives of the people living with mental illness aren’t relevant, as if they are problems to be managed. So many of those narratives are born out of parent/child dynamics that always have power differentials built in, and those dynamics often get replicated in other relationships.

So maybe there’s something radical about starting from the assumption that we can and should have a balanced, equal, mutually supportive relationship, that we have responsibilities to one another and to ourselves.

I don’t think we’re alone in our desire to have that kind of relationship or our struggles to get there. There just hasn’t been a lot of space in the bigger conversation.

I want to write our way into better patterns, more insight, and greater skill. I can only write from my own perspective in this relationship, but I write with the full support of Catharine.

It won’t always be pretty and intellectual. Sometimes I’m so angry I want to blow up the world. But I have faith that showing up to the work and sharing that work with others who know can change things for the better.

Well, This Week Sucked

The Very Hardest Thing